Posts Tagged ‘snow’

[Editor’s note: Check out the snowy road conditions in Colorado with this mashup that includes current road open/close as well as surface status (icy, blowing snow, etc). One of the best I’ve seen. Traffic cameras are overlayed with auto clustering of nearby markers. Includes a searchable list and good legend below the map. Hard to scroll wheal up and down on the page due to the map and list view. And resizing makes it hard to get the legend on the same viewable window area as the map. Thanks Curt!]

My colleage Wilson setup a open-to-everyone Google MyMaps project for folks to note which streets in DC have been plowed. Had to hack the embed with a network link via Google Maps to get all the locations to plot on one map (MyMap usually wants to separate blocks of markers into separate pages and maps).

I’m still digging out from the big storm this weekend in Washington, DC. I received 24″ at my house, ranged from 14″ to over 30″ in the metro area with heaviest around Columbia, Maryland. I worked during the storm and Laris and I tallied the NWS weather spotter reports of snowfall and used the GIS to krig the a map of average depth from about 50 points (which had to be filtered to remove expired values). Then used Illustrator’s Live Trace functionality to vectorize. Preview above (for the local home page promo which didn’t have room for legend, so directly labeled the contours), full graphic below with explainer of how the storm happened (with Laura and Larry).

[Editor’s note: No, this is not an April Fools joke I often get asked, “Hasn’t everything been mapped yet?”. Well, some things always need remapping (and this begs the question as to why don’t movie goers boycott theaters for showing the same the same Hollywood plots year after year, but whatever).The zones affected between Switzerland and Italy include the Matterhorn. Thanks Laris and Todd!]

Global warming is dissolving the Alpine glaciers so rapidly that Italy and Switzerland have decided they must re-draw their national borders to take account of the new realities.

The border has been fixed since 1861, when Italy became a unified state. But for the past century the surface area of the “cryosphere”, the zone of glaciers, permanent snow cover and permafrost, has been shrinking steadily, with dramatic acceleration in the past five years. This is the area over which the national frontier passes and the two countries have now agreed to have their experts sit down together and hash out where it ought to run now.

Daniel Gutknecht, responsible for the co-ordination of national borders at Switzerland’s Office of Topography, said “the border is moving because of the warmer climate”, among other reasons.